A novel de-icing strategy combining electric-heating with plasma synthetic jet actuator

Traditional electro-thermal de-icing strategy has the drawback of high energy consumption and its heat knife accounts for a considerable amount of the cost. Compared to electro-thermal de-icing, thermo-mechanical expulsion de-icing system eliminates the heat knife by combining electric-heating with electro-magnetic expulsion de-icing system. The consumption is significantly lower but the system has complex mechanical structures. In this article, a novel de-icing strategy combining electric-heating with plasma synthetic jet actuator is proposed for the first time. Its main idea is to replace heat knife with a simple mechanical device. During the de-icing process, the electric-heating is used to remove the adhesion force, then a single pulse of plasma synthetic jet actuator exerts a rapid force on ice and makes it fracture. Schlieren imaging shows plasma synthetic jet actuator can make free ice columns fracture into pieces and powder. The ice can even be completely penetrated by pressurized air when the discharge energy is relatively large. And compared with the non-deicing process, the intensities of waves and jets are significantly weakened. During the hybrid de-icing process, high-speed photography shows that plasma synthetic jet actuator can divide an ice layer 200 mm in diameter and 10 mm in thickness into multiple blocks completely in tens of milliseconds after electric-heating removes the adhesion force. Besides, energy consumption of plasma synthetic jet actuator in a de-icing cycle accounts for only 0.27% of the whole system. Compared with the free ice columns of the same size, the ice debonded by electric-heating fragmented into smaller blocks after activating plasma synthetic jet actuator. However, heating for too long does not bring more beneficial effects on the fracture of ice in this experiment. At last, a new “micro piston ice-breaker” which is waterproof is proposed to meet the needs of in-flight de-icing.